Co-Founder & CEO of @Landbasegtm - find your next customer. Co-Founder of @AppDirect - find, buy, and sell technology.
San Francisco
Joined February 2011
- Tweets439
- Following237
- Followers1.3K
- Likes46
Daniel Saks retweeted
Grateful to @evansammccann for the months of thoughtful reporting that went into this story
Building @8vc has been my life’s work so far. What means the most is seeing so many people I’ve been lucky to work with take the time to share their experiences. Thank you all!
The Quiet Force. My profile of @AlexKolicich is out.
Raised by a single mom in Hamilton. Google engineer. Peter Thiel’s math guy. Founding partner of 8VC.
“8VC is 8VC because of Alex.” I was told.
I spent months reporting his story in SF, Palo Alto and Orange County, talking with founders and the people who knew him at Clarium, Mithril and 8VC.
Highlights
- Peter Thiel playing blindfolded chess
- Turning down Geoffrey Hinton’s lab twice
- Dreaming about oil
- Back story on 8VC's investments in Quince, Cognition and Anduril
Link to read below.
We looked at what AI companies pay enterprise sales roles.
4 tiers. Each one requires a new skill set.
OTE by tier:
› Commercial AE: $216K to $250K
› Strategic / Federal AE: $380K to $450K
› Manager, AE (Strategic): $435K to $550K
› Head of Government Sales: $550K to $700K
How to move up each tier:
Commercial → Strategic: sell technical deals with a deployment team.
At Glean, Commercial AEs earn up to $250K. Strategic AEs earn up to $375K. Strategic sellers open the deal. The deployment team wins it by proving the model works on the customer’s data.
Strategic → Manager: build a team model you can repeat.
At Anthropic, AE managers earn up to $550K. The job becomes designing the team that closes deals over and over. ElevenLabs pairs one AE with one solutions engineer and copies that setup across 12+ markets.
Manager → Head of Government Sales: sell through partners.
Anthropic is paying up to $700K for Head of National Security Sales and Head of State and Local Government Sales. The skill here is building federal partnerships and a channel motion that opens routes into government.
P.S. I used Landbase to pull data from 9,881 open roles across 68 AI-native companies.
Software used to be a system of record. Now it’s a system of action.
That shift undoes the decade-old GTM stack: 6sense, Clay, Outreach, Zapier, plus GTM engineers to run it all.
Coding agents with the right data now do it from one prompt.
The AI talent war has a clear scoreboard.
In the last 12 months, 310 people went directly from Meta to OpenAI. Only 32 made the reverse move. We mapped direct moves between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and SpaceXAI.
Meta is the frontier labs' talent pipeline. 591 people went straight from Meta to another frontier lab. Only 100 came the other way. OpenAI was the biggest winner: 362 joined directly from the other four labs, 89 left for them. Net +273.
Anthropic barely loses anyone to rival labs. Only 21 people left Anthropic directly for another frontier lab in 12 months, the fewest of the five, while 223 joined from them. It gained more than it lost against every lab: 143 vs 4 with Meta, 37 vs 3 with DeepMind, 37 vs 13 with OpenAI.
DeepMind people are choosing Anthropic. 37 went directly from Google DeepMind to Anthropic. 3 went the other way. That's more than went from DeepMind to OpenAI (21). SpaceXAI and Meta are nearly even: 26 from SpaceXAI to Meta, 31 from Meta to SpaceXAI.
How we counted: a "move" means someone's very next job after lab A was lab B. They started at lab B in the 12 months to Oct 13, 2026 and left lab A in July 2025 or later. Based on public work-history profiles, so these are minimums. Meta includes Facebook; SpaceXAI includes xAI.
Made with Landbase data on Grok. Happy to run this for any set of companies. Reply with the ones you'd want to see.
I
1 in 5 open roles at AI companies is in go-to-market.
Even the best AI products in the world don’t sell themselves.
Top 10 by open GTM roles:
1. Databricks: 313 open GTM roles
2. OpenAI: 154
3. ElevenLabs: 140
4. Anthropic: 134
5. Cursor: 72
6. Sierra: ~53
7. LangChain: ~46
8. Glean: ~43
9. Decagon: 36
10. Abnormal AI: ~29
Outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber, AI adoption is still in the early innings.
P.S. To get the data, we used Landbase to analyze 9,881 open roles across 68 AI-native companies
Spoke at GTM World Tour SF.
AEO, cold calling, LinkedIn. What works for them may not for you. Keep testing.
The constants:
› Niche audience
› Tight targeting
› Right buyer, time, message
First-timers booked meetings live on BetterContact data.
Thanks Roman & Nicolas!
Opening GTM 2026 with a talk on RevOps as the central intelligence of your org.
Agents can now run list building, research, and CRM hygiene. So what do you take off reps' plates so they can focus on what closes?
📅 Sept 29 · 9:20 AM ET
📍 The Glasshouse, NYC
The 2026 stack running Landbase:
GTM: Landbase, HubSpot, Nooks
Data: BetterContact, Explorium
Email: Mission Inbox, ZeroBounce, Warmy
Infra: GCP, Vercel, Pinecone, Temporal
AI: OpenAI, Anthropic
Dev: Cursor, CodeRabbit, Linear
Analytics: Amplitude, Heap, Webflow
What are we missing?
We analyzed 8M+ cold emails in Landbase.
Subject lines that drove the most leads:
→ "[Company Name]"
→ "Re: [Project]"
→ "[Topic] feedback"
Highest reply rates:
→ Non-profit & Gov (0.48%)
→ 0-10 employees (0.37%)
Takeaway: specific, contextual subject lines convert best.
Here is a live demo of the Landbase CLI!
Started with a brand off a key fob. Got 3 TAM segments, target titles, and enriched contacts in seconds.
@RetentionAdam: "That's pretty dope."
“I’m thrilled to join AppDirect at such an exciting stage in its journey,” said Lin. “AppDirect’s mission to simplify how businesses buy, sell, and manage technology aligns with my passion for helping innovative companies grow sustainably." businesswire.com/news/home/2…
“You shouldn’t need a PhD to grow your business—The GTM-2 Omni makes enterprise-grade targeting and messaging accessible to everyone,” said Daniel Saks, Co-Founder and CEO of Landbase. “AI should simplify GTM, not make it harder." businesswire.com/news/home/2…
Check out my latest article: Behind the Vibe: How Multi‑Agent AI Systems Power Vibe AI linkedin.com/pulse/behind-vi… via @LinkedIn
🔥 Landbase is one of Business Insider’s “43 Startups to Bet Your Career on in 2025”! 🚀💡
With millions of startups launched each year, making this list is a huge honor. To be recognized alongside top companies is a testament to the incredible team we’ve built and the momentum behind what we’re creating.
But let’s be real—we’re just getting started. 👀
If you're an engineer, product builder, or GTM innovator looking to make an impact, now is the time to bet on Landbase. We’re hiring top talent to help shape the future of AI-powered go-to-market strategy. ⚡
Massive thanks to Business Insider and the team behind this list— Ben Bergman, Julia Hornstein, Riddhi Kanetkar, Melia Russell, Samantha Stokes, and Rebecca Torrence!
Let’s build something legendary. 🚀🔥
hashtag#Landbase hashtag#BusinessInsider hashtag#TopStartups hashtag#AgenticAI hashtag#Hiring hashtag#Engineering hashtag#GTM
Daniel Saks retweeted
($574M raised 🤯)
Nailing (authentic) conviction in your vision...
Thank you, @DanielSaks, Co-Founder of @AppDirect @LandbaseAI for sharing your story!
Check out the full episode on the @Zendesk Sit Down Startup podcast (see comments for links)
open.spotify.com/episode/7fv…
🚀 Excited to share my conversation with Benjamin Shapiro on the Martech Podcast about how Landbase is transforming sales and marketing agencies with Agentic AI! 🎙️
✨ Today’s Big Announcement: We’re launching the Landbase Agency Network—a powerful ecosystem for agencies to collaborate and grow using our cutting-edge tools and platform.
In the podcast, I discussed: 🔹 How Agentic AI streamlines and optimizes workflows 🔹 The revival of old-school marketing channels 🔹 Balancing creativity with automation for future-ready strategies
As I mentioned, "Agentic AI is not just about chatting; it's about your software working for you, so you can reclaim your day and do more of what you love."
This is Part 1 of 2—stay tuned for more on how Agentic AI will revolutionize sales & marketing!
🎧 Listen to the Podcast Here:
lnkd.in/gpbyyGM7
Landbase MarTech Benjamin Shapiro
hashtag#B2B hashtag#AI hashtag#MarketingConsultant hashtag#MarketingAnalytics hashtag#ArtificialIntelligence hashtag#Sales hashtag#Marketing hashtag#AgenticAI hashtag#Landbase hashtag#MartechPodcast
martechpod.com/episode/how-a…
Daniel Saks retweeted
In B2B sales, company's need to first earn the right to enter into a commercial relationship, even at the 0 to 1 phase 🤝
🎙 🎙Check out the full interview with @danielsaks and @LandbaseAI on the process of building credibility in the sales process: bit.ly/landbase-br